Town Square

USA and South Africa are the last

Original post made
by jrm, Vista Grande Elementary School,
on Mar 15, 2010

Think it can't happen to you? Putting off diagnostic procedures right now because your deductable is huge before insurance kicks in?
I am putting it out there that we need to act now and support a revision to our system. I am challenging other savvy healthcare execs in Danville to contribute candidly to this thread about their global experience with gov't run systems. Folks, everyone else within industrialized economic systems on this planet does it this way
and I want to help you understand this...at the end of the day it is so unfair we are robbed of true "liberty" given our family legacy assets will ultimately be tranferred to providing care to a loved one at the end of their disease. The USA and South Africa are the only ones left....please listen to me and others in my business, if they have the vision and concern to speak out.

Posted by Underinsured!
a resident of Danville
on Mar 17, 2010 at 2:53 pm

Anyone who hasn't seen it should watch "Sicko" - very informative, objective look at government healthcare. I pay a fortune for my family's insurance (self-employed), however, we often have to skip routine "well checks" because the deductible is just too high. It doesn't have to be like this!!

Remember, insurance companies have huge financial stakes with keeping everything privatized...they are pros at using scare tactics and political payoffs to prevent any kind of reform!

We do need healthcare reform and "yes" insurance is expensive but we do not need the government to run our healthcare either. Insurance companies should be forced to take patients with pre-existing conditions and if insurance companies could sell across state lines they could be more competitive. Also, we need tort reform. Obamacare wants us to pay for abortions and college loans! Yes, they are in the bill! Obama is cutting Medicare by $500B while adding more patients which means rationing to our seniors. Doctor's fees will be cut by 21% and hospital reimbursements for Medicare patients will be cut $1.3B so thousands of doctors and hospitals as well as hospices, and clinics will refuse to treat or take Medicare patients. If you have elderly parents or are a senior this should interest you!

I have actually lived under not one but two other countries health care systems. They were and remain awful with wait times, lack of care and even relatives providing care to hospital patients when the staffs went on strike! Improvements are always underfunded and behind the times. Routine procedures done in the USA are not routine there - down to having to buy your own vaccinations (meds and needles) for children and finding someone to give the shot or have long wait times at clinics (understaffed with low paid doctors). In addition, remember it was in the news quite a lot, in Europe several years back when temperatures hit 100, even in Britain, thousands of hospital patients died because their governments had not invested in updating hospitals to have air conditioning, nor even ice making machines!, and the patients died. I do not want that to happen here and we have a good example of that already under the VA system and what happened at Walter Reed. Sicko never mentioned those things. The writer thinks it is better elsewhere because he has heard promotional material not reality.

Currently the healthcare bill that is being reviewed includes paybacks and political favors to some at the expense of others: so Florida and North Dakota seniors get a pass but California seniors pay and are taxed more. Or let us say your plan is the same as a union plan but they are exempt from theirs being called a 'cadillac plan'. Can you imagine if a private company operated like our Congress is today with these bribes how condemned they would be?

To the above writer who condemns the insurance company. Unlike Google with a profit of 30-50%, insurance companies return about 2-5% like grocery stores. Huge financial stakes, not really but easy to throw out these scare tactics.

While as a self-employed you do not have a company paying half of your insurance premium, you do have control over your choice of a health care plan, your deductible and how much you want to pay since you chose it, and unlike company employees the trade-off to that is your ability to write off many other expenses against your income - neither way is bad just a different path for each.

Adding 10 to 30 million people will only make everyone's situation worse by adding costs and taxes, decreasing access to doctors/nurses/hospitals as the millions are absorbed with no comparative increase in the number of doctors, nurses or hospitals being built. In fact, if experience elsewhere in the world is a benchmark as all the salaries for nurses, doctors, insurance employees become part of the government bureaucracy health care costs will increase and care access will decrease as caps will be introduced at all levels.

Once we are able to see the congressional bills the actual situation will be worse. Remember the house bill that came before this included 100 new government agencies, ability to fine you, increased taxes, and more. Those basic issues are before we even get to abortion, treatment of seniors, reductions in medicaid, tort reform, ability to have insurance across statelines, etc.

For California recall that in the 1980's there were close to 40 insurance providers. Now there are about six and little competition and flexibility. A government singlepayer system is infinitely worse and that is the goal.

Posted by jrm
a resident of Vista Grande Elementary School
on Mar 19, 2010 at 2:27 pmjrm is a registered user.

Grandma and Askidoo....we will just have to respectfully disagree, I understand this is a highly contentious issue. I would reiterate the abortion comment is just false rhetoric, that is simply not the case as has been clarified time and time again. Askidoo's real life experience is probably reality in some countries, I'm curious where he/she was. An important point is that these citizens had access to a doctor and were not facing financial ruin in the process of being treated...Askidoo is missing the point that the current trends are simply not sustainable financially or morally. Those of us in the healthcare business know reform has been needed for a long time, clinton started the dialogue, Bush supressed it, and now it is time to finally wrestle this issue to ground. It is of note that yesterday AARP and the AMA came out in favor of the bill. I am ashamed of the opportunistic behavior of my ex employer, Anthem. their logic explaining the recent jacking up of rates simply does not hold water. But again, I recognize there are strong passions on both sides, I just hope the fact that outside of the health insurers most of us involved in the business say this is long overdue resonates with those of you on the fence.

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